The Retrospective

Much like the author himself, the novel’s protagonist is a cultural icon among Israel’s literati. He is Yair Moses, a film director whose prolific career is being surveyed in a retrospective held in a sleepy Spanish town. There Moses encounters a painting that overshadows the celebration, recalling an episode involving his leading actress and his longtime screenwriter. Back in Tel Aviv, he attempts to salvage his fraught relationship with the screenwriter, but doing so demands the reconstruction of an experience that he would rather forget. “Can it be, after forty years, that the scene has again eluded him?” he says, toward the end of the book. One wishes that Yehoshua had spent more time exploring Moses’ quest for absolution rather than detailing the minutiae of the director’s films—which bear striking thematic resemblances to his own early works. Still, he achieves an autumnal tone as he ruminates on memory’s slippery hold on life and on art. ♦

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